METZ.- An endless Sunday, when time is suspended between leisure and rebellion. To celebrate its 15th anniversary, the Centre Pomp dou-Metz is inviting the general public to take a vertiginous dive into the history of art and contemporary thought through the Endless Sunday, an exceptional exhibition that will be taking over the entire museum. More than 400 works from the collections of the Centre Pompidou will be subjected to the implacable gaze of Maurizio Cattelan, while in addition, some thirty works by the Italian artist will offer a lucid, melancholic examination of modern mythologies.

Structured like an ABC, the exhibition alternates iconic works and unexpected pieces, creating transhistorical dialogues. Berger&Berger’s immersive exhibition design transforms the museum into a circular trail, echoing cycles of time as well as the architecture of Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines.

Designed by Irma Boom, the book published in conjunction with the exhibition, far from being a classic catalogue, explores the ideas in more depth. In it Maurizio Cattelan gives unique insight into his own work and his personal story. More than a collection of texts, it is an autobiography.

The wall texts convey an embodied voice: that of Maurizio Cattelan and the female inmates of the Giudecca Women's Prison in Venice, expressed through an abecedary. In the gallery, inmates trained in mediation from the Metz Penitentiary Center occasionally accompany group visits.

What is meant by an endless Sunday? It is a day that stretches between freedom and constraint, memory and projection, wandering and engagement. With this exhibition, the Centre Pompidou-Metz offers a labyrinth of stories in which art, in dialogue with reality, continues to open new perspectives in our vision of the world.

Fifteen years after his inaugural exhibition Chefs-d’œuvre ? (2010), during which the Centre Pompidou- Metz examined in particular our knowledge of art history, the institution offers a fresh take on the works and the concept of a collection. The Endless Sunday represents a culmination of this reflection. This wide-ranging exhibition showcasing Maurizio Cattelan and the Centre Pompidou’s collection marks the 15th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, creating a rich dialogue with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, currently undergoing complete renovation.

A new perspective on an exceptional collection

The exhibition occupies the whole of the museum, from the Forum to the Grand Nef, from Gallery 1 to the rooftops, transformed for the first time into a sculpture garden, and the Jardin Sud, the exhibition brings together nearly 400 works from various departments of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, which are juxtaposed with 40 works by Maurizio Cattelan, the co-curator. An internationally renowned artist, Cattelan casts his perceptive eye over the collection, creating an unexpected interplay of correspondences.

Since it opened in 2010, the Centre Pompidou-Metz has been privileged to host numerous major works loaned by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, works that have marked the museum’s history and exhibitions. The Endless Sunday is part of this dynamic, offering an immersion in the collection through a multitude of different media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, video and film, in an unprecedented dialogue with the world of Maurizio Cattelan. A major contemporary artist, Maurizio Cattelan infuses the exhibition with his perceptive and unorthodox approach, his presence adding a new dimension to this prestigious collection. His outlook is both melancholic and ironic. He examines the contradictions in society, explores ways of thwarting forms of authority and questions belief systems. The universe he has been creating since the 1990s embraces subversion and engagement, revealing a world in mutation.

Sunday: day of ritual, leisure and revolt

In many ancient cultures, Sunday – dies solis (day of the sun) for the Romans – was associated with the sun and its worship. In AD 321, Emperor Constantine made it a day of rest and prayer throughout the Roman empire. Over the centuries, its significance evolved. From sacred time to free time, Sunday became, in the 20th century, a day for leisure pursuits, sport and, more recently, consumerism. It is also the day when we go for a stroll in a park, visit a museum, relax at home or enjoy a family meal, while not forgetting the undercurrent of revolt, of uprising, which can emerge suddenly at any moment. Veering between tenderness and guilt, the exhibition reflects this complexity, highlighting the obstacles of our times in order to speculate on alternative days in the future.

Traditionally associated with rest and contemplation, Sunday is a paradoxical day. From sacred day to a day of leisure and consumption, it reflects the changes that have taken place in society. Taking the form of an ABC, a nod to Gilles Deleuze, this thematic exhibition explores the day’s multiple facets. The sections, each named after a poem, film or novel (A for ‘Air de famille’, B for ‘Bats-toi’, C for ‘Conduis-moi sur la lune’, etc.), revisit the ideas associated with Sunday, while immersing visitors in the complex, tortured world of Maurizio Cattelan, who takes them on a historical and sensorial journey.

An immersion in architecture and design

Visitors can wander freely between the 26 letters of the alphabet, to which a 27th has been added, for the section devoted to ‘Sunday’. Designed by Berger&Berger, the exhibition roams across the history of art, leading to astonishing associations on every floor of the museum.

The use of space plays on forms and cycles. Echoing the hexagonal architecture of Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, the exhibition is organised around a circular flow in the Grande Nef and concentric circles in Gallery 1, punctuated with straight lines that structure the visitor experience.

The exhibition unfolds across multiple levels, offering a journey through the history of art and its disruptions. In the Forum, the monumental presence of L.O.V.E., Cattelan’s iconic sculpture depicting a hand with its fingers severed, leaving only the middle finger extended, establishes an immediate confrontation with the visitor upon entering the museum. This anti-monument raises questions about power dynamics and belief systems at play in public space.

In the Grande Nef, the snake ‘Uroborus’, an image of the infinite cycle, serves as an introduction and sets the tone for the exhibition, in which ritual objects, anonymous artefacts and contemporary works dialogue with each other. Chinese bi discs, funerary ornaments that evoke the infinite, are juxtaposed with Meret Oppenheim’s Old Snake [Vieux Serpent], a symbol of both origin and ending. Maurizio Cattelan’s Felix, with its gigantic cat’s skeleton as big as a dinosaur, calls into question institutional classifications and concepts of fiction and reality. It invades the ‘Sunday’section, in which such major works as Sonia Delaunay’s Le Bal Bullier reveal Sunday’s multiple meanings. The work’s bright, warm colours, as if bathed in light, respond to that of Felix González-Torres’s Last Light, featuring a string of lights with 24 bulbs corresponding to the hours of the day and representing the passage of time, a fragile cycle in memory of AIDs victims.

In Galerie 1, Sunday becomes an arena for political and artistic tensions: ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ presents works revealing post-war traumas, like Otto Dix’s Memories of the Halls of Mirrors in Brussels [Souvenirs de la galerie des glaces à Bruxelles], or capturing the violence of physical combat, as in Natalia Goncharova’s Wrestlers [Les Lutteurs].

Other works highlight the transgressive spirit and radical changes of avant-garde movements: Georges Braque’s Large Nude [Le Grand Nu] explores the limits of Cubist perception, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square [Carré noir] pushes abstraction to its most pure essence and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Dada Head [Tête Dada] paints a portrait of the Dadaist revolution in a resolutely anti-authoritarian act.

‘Quand nous cesserons de comprendre le monde’ spotlights the concept of misappropriation: in his now historic Comedian, Maurizio Cattelan tapes a banana to the wall, held in place not so much by adhesive tape as by the statement that gives it the status of a work of art. By marking it with a symbolic signifier, Cattelan explores the legitimation of the object. The gesture is not a simple act of provocation but the enacting of a collective fantasy: art as the pure circulation of the monetary signifier. The work fascinates and exasperates om equal measure because it reveals the blind spot of the market, this space where the object of desire comes up against the recognition it arouses. Here the object has the consistency of a fetish that equates the art scene not with a truth or a vision, but with an economics of the gaze and exchange.

Another high point of the exhibition is the presence in the Grande Nef of the Wrong Gallery – New York’s smallest gallery, which operated in the Chelsea neighbourhood from 2002 to 2005. The Wrong Gallery was an emblematic project created by Cattelan together with Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. For the Endless Sunday, the gallery, which measures 2,5 m2, hosts an exhibition programme within the exhibition. The first guest artist is Sidival Fila.

Duchamp, Breton et l’esprit du jeu

The section “Haine, amitié, séduction, amour, marriage” (“Hatred, friendship, seduction, love, marriage”) was inspired by the passion of Marcel Duchamp and his entourage for chess. Duchamp’s games table, loaned especially for the exhibition, is being exhibited for the first time in public. It is displayed in conjunction with the creations of Max Ernst, Hans Richter and Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva, who offer a metaphor for the game of class, gender and power. A notable chess player, Maurizio Cattelan provides his own vision of the game in the form of his evocatively titled Good versus Evil, which offers a new corpus of pawns.

The presence of the wall from André Breton’s studio is another high point of the exhibition. Located at the heart of the intuitive exploration of Endless Sunday, this free accumulation of objects and works collected by Breton throughout his life constitutes a vibrant meditation on chance, Surrealism and the freedom of the gaze. The legendary bas-relief Gradiva from the collections of the Vatican Museums, which has served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for modern and contemporary artists, notably the Surrealists, is also on display in the “Odyssey” section. Gradiva – “the woman who walks” – evokes ideas of travel, of myths and stories, of unconscious urges and desires. It introduces the teeming universe of the Wall from the Studio [Mur de l'atelier] of André Breton, displayed in all its glory nearby, and on show for the first time outside its Parisian setting.

The Breton Wall [Mur Breton], an iconic ensemble that joined the Centre Pompidou in early 2000, consists of 255 heterogeneous objects and works assembled by Breton in the office of his studio at 42, rue Fontaine in Paris: African, Amerindian and Oceanic masks, found objects, minerals, shells, fossils are combined with no hierarchy with the Surrealist works of Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. A veritable collection within the collection, the wall from Breton’s studio, thanks to its free and inventive juxtapositions, sets the tone for the carefree layout of the Endless Sunday, which attempts to sketch out new meanings and hitherto unexplored trajectories.

The meaning of liberty: the wall texts and educational resources

The exhibition wall texts, written by Maurizio Cattelan together with inmates from the women’s prison at Giudecca, in Venice, explore multiple facets of the ABC. Through their words, a common reflection emerges, spanning the intimate and the political, personal statement and collective engagement. These intersecting voices enrich the exhibition and deepen the exploration of the human condition and the experience of imprisonment, while resonating with the idea of the Endless Sunday, a day when freedom can sometimes seem suspended, but where hope and rebellion take shape. This collaboration embodies the power of language as a means of liberation.

In direct connection with the exhibition labels, the gallery mediators are accompanied by inmates trained to occasionally guide groups of visitors through the exhibition. This initiative, in collaboration with the Metz Penitentiary Center, invites the inmates to reclaim their role in society through art. In doing so, they become active participants in artistic dialogue, conveying the notion of freedom within a museum space, while offering visitors a unique insight and an unexpected perspective on the works on display. Their role as mediators restores meaning to the concept of reintegration, returning to art its power as a vehicle for reconciliation between the individual, society, and freedom.